Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio on set at the Cutten Murphy’s Market. | File photo.

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It’s finally opening day for director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest masterpiece*, One Battle After Another, which was partly filmed right here in Humboldt County, and in an interview over on the movie website Letterboxd, Anderson and star Leonardo DiCaprio say our region had a distinct impact on the film.

DiCaprio plays a paranoid, washed up former revolutionary named Bob, whose 16-year-old daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) is a student at a high school, played in the movie by Eureka High. (Many local students are extras.)

Here’s Anderson expressing his appreciation for our humble community:

We knew that we were going to be up in Northern California for Bob’s cabin in the woods with Willa. That took us to scouting Eureka and all points around there. We ended up obviously loving it, finding locations and finding a community and investing in the high school, Eureka High School, and visiting just for their high school dance to see how they decorated it, what kind of music did they play, what were the kids wearing, what was the energy level, to taking videos, hanging out with them. Really just trying to be there but not assert our presence—to try to kind of almost oddly act like a documentary crew. I mean, as much as you could by coming in with 50 people. But try to keep a low profile and not come in as the big Hollywood machine attacking a town, but just to try to embrace what they had. 

    DiCaprio, for his part, said his character “clicked” into place when he arrived here and experienced our “hip-neck” vibe (half hippie, half redneck).

    “Yeah, it’s a little mix of ‘don’t tread on me,’ ‘get off of my property,’ but mixed with radical sort of woke ideas simultaneously,” the actor says. “It’s a culture that—I understood Bob when we got into Eureka.”

    Local actress Tisha Sloan, who we recently interviewed, also gets a shoutout in the interview, with Anderson calling her “so wonderful.”

    Read the full interview at this link and, if you haven’t yet, watch the trailer below.

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    *Yes, it’s a stone cold masterpiece. And it includes plenty of recognizable Humboldt locales. This Outpost reporter highly recommends that you get to your nearest movie theater and experience the film alongside some fellow locals at your earliest convenience.

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